Home
Discover Islam
Quran Recitations
Lectures
Fatwa
Articles
Fiqh
E-Books
Women
Boys & Girls 
Articles
Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, has announced a unilateral truce in the Gaza Strip.
Israel will halt its offensive in Gaza at 0000 GMT on Sunday but troops will remain in the enclave for the time being and will respond to Hamas fire, Olmert said on Saturday.
The announcement came after a meeting of Israel's Security Council on Saturday evening and halts the 22-day offensive which has left more than 1200 Palestinians dead, more than 400 of them children.
Fragile ceasefire
As 2am (0000 GMT) passed and the ceasefire came into effect, Israeli aircraft droned overhead and occasional flares lit the night sky over Gaza.
A few minutes after the truce was due to take effect, live television pictures from the city of Gaza showed a shower of flares and a fire on the ground.
But the explosions and gunfire of the past three weeks appeared to have been silenced for now.
Israeli reconnaissance drones could be heard but the city was quieter than for many nights.
According to Israeli military officials, Palestinian groups launched at least eight rockets from the Gaza Strip following Olmert's announcement of the unilateral ceasefire.
No one was injured in the attacks, they said.
The Hamas movement and other armed groups have fired over 30 rockets and mortar rounds in the last 24 hours.
An Israeli military spokesman said shortly before the cessation was to begin that Israel "will respond to any attack against Israeli civilians or soldiers".
Hamas said it would continue fighting in Gaza as long as Israeli troops remained in the Hamas-ruled Strip.
"If the Israeli military continues its existence in the Gaza Strip, that is a wide door for the resistance against the occupation forces," Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official in Lebanon told Al Jazeera.
Fawzi Barhum, a Hamas spokesman, said: "The Zionist enemy must stop all its aggression, completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip, lift the blockade, and open the crossings. We will not accept the presence of a single soldier in Gaza.
"The enemy's declaration of a unilateral ceasefire confirms that this is a unilateral war launched in one direction, from the enemy upon our people," Barhum, who is in Gaza, said in a statement.
Other Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip, which like Hamas have fired rockets on Israel, rejected Israel's ceasefire.
Islamic Jihad said in a statement that "the resistance will continue its battle as long as occupation forces are on the land of Gaza and as long as the siege and the blockade continue.
Abu Youssef Said, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, said: "A unilateral ceasefire is nothing to do with us ... and we will continue to bear arms."
Uncertainty prevails
Alan Fisher, Al Jazeera's correspondent on the Gaza-Israel border, said: "What the Israelis are doing by this unilateral declaration is taking all the power into their own hands and they will almost dictate now what happens, and when.
"Israel could almost go it alone now because of the role Egypt is playing in talking to Hamas and this deal, as Israel sees it, isn't with Hamas - it is something they are doing on their own," he said.
Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza, said: "There are many questions that remain unanswered and what this announcement will mean for the Palestinians on the ground remains unclear because there was no clarity in that announcement."
Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, told Al Jazeera: "After the Israelis have managed to kill as many of the children and women of Gaza I doubt that people of Gaza will believe them. Ehud Olmert is a compulsive liar.
"The main objective of this operation right from the start was to turn the people of Gaza against Hamas and pave the way for Mahmoud Abbas [the Palestinian president] to return to Gaza. That is why the civilians were deliberately attacked and their lives shattered.
"This objective has failed, it hasn't been achieved and now Israel is declaring a unilateral truce. It is a defeat for the real objectives of this operation," Tamimi said.
Rami Khouri, the Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera: "This unilateral ceasefire has no chance of being a durable ceasefire.
"Israel has tried many unilateral approaches and each one of them has simply made the situation worse for Israel.
"There is no chance of any unilateral move by Israel having any success. It has to be a negotiated agreement that responds to the basic legitimate needs of both sides," he said.
Sharm summit
A summit aimed at giving international backing to the ceasefire will be held in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Sunday.
It is to be attended by the leaders of Germany, France, Spain, Britain, Italy, Turkey, Jordan and the Czech Republic - which holds the rotating EU presidency - as well as Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
It was not immediately clear whether Israel would send a representative, and Hamas has not been invited.
PHOTO CAPTION
Israeli artillery fires a long-range shell towards the Gaza Strip as seen from the Israeli-Gaza border.
Al-Jazeera
